Ok, it this video does include me along with some awesome takes from other thought leaders. Note to self: I misunderstood the question and thought we were only talking about video. I still made the cut so there you go.

July 25 through July 29 is Social Business week on Focus.com. If you’ve read my blog, you know that I’m a fan of the Social CRM movement, but I am not an expert – so I’m leaving that to the pros. I am sticking to my expertise, hosting a couple of events about social and sales and marketing. I am hosting a webinar with the master of content/inbound/social media marketing, Mike Volpe, on Friday, July 29, at 1 pm PT. Before that, I am hosting a social selling roundtable at 11 am PT with Nigel Edelshain, Miles Austin and Koka Sexton. It’s fun trading ideas for using social for a lot of things. Sales is definitely a favorite of mine.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from folks is not having enough time for social endeavors. I usually tell people I wouldn’t recommend it if it’s a time-suck. So I’ve compiled a list of easy things that salespeople can do, none of which seems too scary or daunting – and it can all be done right away. Let me know what you would add to the following list.

Create a LinkedIn profile.

Fill it out completely, including a picture.

Upgrade your account.

Watch every day from your upgraded LinkedIn account to see who clicked on your profile.

Connect with as many of your business and personal contacts as you can.

Move beyond business cards – get in the habit of connecting with people immediately after you meet them.

Spend some time seeing if your prospects are connected to any of your contacts and ask for a referral.

Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry. Not just so you can see the conversations happening in your space, but so you can join the same “clubs” that your prospects are in.

Figure out where your prospects are on the Internet (with only a few cases, everyone is). Is it Twitter, LinkedIn, focus.com, etc.? It could even be a message board somewhere.

Watch them. Remember the title of this post is “easy.” Don’t worry about doing much; you can just watch. You will gain insight into your prospects that you’ve never had before.

Recognize their good works. If they write an insightful blog post or answer a question really well, send them a note.

Find the top influencers in your space (they will be on Twitter or Google if they are influencers) and follow them.

Create a social relationship with the influencers. This is akin to being friends with the cool kids at school.

Before a sales call, look up your prospect’s or customer’s recent social “works” – posts, tweets, Q&A. Mention it to them; they will love it.

There – was that hard? Let’s just start with that. There’s more…but you gotta start somewhere.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

I present a webinar with Mark Feldman of Netprospex titled “You Bought a List, Now What?” that over the years has been one of the more popular presentations we have done together, as 1000s of people typically sign up. We are doing it again on Wednesday, March 2 and Thursday, March 3 at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET). I have made some updates to the webinar and have new rantings on the topic (thus prompting me to write this post).

First, allow me to get on my soapbox. What we are talking about is outbound vs. inbound, or push vs. pull. The vast majority of chatter in the marketing blogosphere is about content marketing, earned media, inbound marketing, and so forth; in other words, everyone is advocating for pull. One of my good friends Adam Needles basically called outbound email “stupid s#!*” in our Focus Roundtable together. I am a gigantic advocate for pull marketing as well. I believe in the tenets of inbound marketing. Hey, who doesn’t want someone to walk into their store? But it’s just not realistic all the time. Sometimes you need to put out the sandwich board and entice people to come into the store, and if it works, why wouldn’t you do it all the time?

Random thoughts on why the Outbound b2b campaign lives on:

You have to go outbound for targeted prospects. If you are trying to reach a particular buying persona, you have to push/outbound. If you want to wait for content to get you the leads you need to feed the beast, you will be sitting on the unemployment line. This does not mean you don’t create remarkable content and develop long-term trusted content relationships with prospects. It means you figure out whom you want to talk to and reach out to them via phone, email, and so forth so you can get to them today instead of tomorrow.

You don’t have time. A blog post or even months of blog posts won’t yield the number of conversations you need to fill the pipeline. I get bummed when I hear the startup VP of Marketing talk about his/her plan for content marketing over the next nine months, and it doesn’t include generating leads now. It’s not their fault; they read the blog posts and are doing the right thing. The problem is, if you don’t have a plan for near-term pipeline, you’re in trouble.

Sales reps are doing it right now instead of waiting for you. I asked one of my favorite sales experts Tibor Shanto what topics resonate most with sales folks and he said “prospecting.” In other words, sales needs leads. Actually, I did a webinar awhile back with Jill Konrath, and she said the same thing: “What sales needs right now is leads.” So, marketing: Is our answer to write some more blog posts and get more tweets? No, it’s to drive pipeline, and that necessitates action.

You can do both (push/pull). Until the content marketing machine can drive the numbers you need from the right people, you have to do something. In most cases, that means outbound or paid media. But do both; the long-term win of having a content marketing/nurturing strategy is the right thing to do.

In my preso, I try to break the essentials for successful outbound activity into simple components:

Planning: It sounds simple, but people just buy names and don’t flesh out what they want to do next.

Persona building: Determine “who” you want to target, understand what makes them tick, and then the message works for them.

Content/offers: Content marketing is a big deal in the outbound campaigns. What you offer people is extremely important. This should be driven by buyer personas (for examples, an executive may want one thing whereas managers may want another).

Multi-channel targeting: Successful outbound requires a mix of different ways to reach out to the prospect. The most common and most successful is a combination of phone and email. This also includes nurturing and social media.

Metrics and optimization: This should be standard operating procedure in this day and age, but it isn’t, so I have to remind you. Figure out what you need to know and make your programs better.

Here we are again. If you missed Part I, make sure to read it first. Once again, before we begin, I need to introduce the members of the band:

On the guitar, Tom Scearce (@TLOTL), and on the electric keyboard, Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski).

I can say this, we had a lot of fun. Check out numbers 37-49. @TLOTL has some great ones.

25. Cold calling: I really have no idea why I put this on here. It’s pretty simple: You pick up the phone and call someone who has no idea you are calling. In today’s day and age, this is best left to professionals — a.k.a., outsourced.

26. Contacts: Just names. The contact movement has been brought upon us by breakthrough companies such as Jigsaw, demandbase and NetProspex. These are not leads, even if these companies market them as such. Contact purchasing is a critical component to push marketing (see below).

27. Leads: A lead is a person who has opted in for an offer (see below). As mentioned above, a contact is not a lead.

28. Offer: An offer can be defined as “something” someone has opted-in for. These can be discrete offers such as white papers, webinars and podcasts. They can also be an appointment with a sales person.

29. Lead generation: Activities designed to create leads.

30. Demand generation: All the activities designed to create demand. Not just lead generation, which is part of it. Everything — including things like PR, speaking engagements, advertising, discounts or special offers and so on and so on. BTW, this is an interesting point of conversation — check out some of the answers to this on Focus.com.

31. Lead nurturing: A process that uses content (offers, tools, white papers, etc.) and distribution tactics (email, phone, Web, etc.) to market to leads over time until they are measurably ready to engage. This one was hard. I got some terrific definitions from experts on Focus.com.

32. Remarkable content: You need to develop this every day, and you know it’s remarkable if people can apply it right away. You need to deliver on three characteristics: 1) value: create substantive, meaningful and high-quality content and 2) efficiency: package for simplicity and ease of consumption; 3) relevance: target buyers and address their specific challenges. (@cjablonski)

33. Push marketing: “Knocking on someone’s door.” In other words, using outbound marketing tactics such as email, phone and direct mail to market to contacts in order to create leads. Examples are outsourced appointment setting and email campaigns to a list.

34. Pull marketing: As opposed to push marketing, “getting people to walk into your store.” Pull means you are using SEO, paid search, etc. to attract people who are searching for something you offer. It also includes getting people to look at your products in other stores through online media and white paper syndication, for example. Because not all buyers are walking into your store, you need to make sure you are represented in other stores that attract your type of buyer.

35. Landing page: A Web page with a call-to-action to download an offer, such as a webinar, a white paper, and so on. In order to download the offer, the user has to fill out a form. (@cjablonski)

36. Direct mail: The act of sending a marketing offer via the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, and so on. This is a dying lead-generation tool. NOTE: there are marketers who believe direct mail still works despite the cost and low conversion rates. My suggestion is that, if you don’t do it now, don’t start.

37. Return on contribution: Anyone who takes the time and energy to create remarkable content needs to also invest time in managing return on contribution. This can mean several things: 1) crowd-sourcing the content to leverage the friends and followers of the contributors for added distribution; 2) syndicating your content through targeted media properties; 3) engaging in online conversations where your content can be delivered in a relevant context ; and 4) leveraging your content across multiple campaigns, including lead-nurturing programs. (@TLOTL)

38. Micro-marketed content: The opposite of mass-marketed content. An unmediated, free-flowing discussion among genuine experts in a niche category (e.g., this discussion on Focus.com) is often more relevant and helpful to buyers than a banner ad or an industry trade publication. (@TLOTL)

39. “Multi-channel, multi-touch”: The mantra of any successful pipeline/revenue generation program. Email, Web and phone are all integrated and response-measured (scored) using marketing automation services. (@TLOTL)

40. The “three legged stool”: In direct marketing, results are usually, ultimately, a function of the:

List (or audience)

Offer

Creative

Underperform in any one of these areas and the stool falls over. (@TLOTL)

41. The revenue/sausage factory: A useful metaphor for helping the uninitiated understand how the marketing and sales team work together to drive the top line. The factory can include “upstream” suppliers like Google, direct mail programs or demand-gen agencies. And it can also encompass post-sales “revenue recognition” functions like professional services and account management. (@TLOTL)

42. Pipeline erosion rate: Your sales team converts your leads into pipeline deals. They win some, they lose some. Some deals roll into next month/quarter. Some don’t. The erosion rate measures the lost pipeline value that must be replaced through incremental demand-gen efforts and budget. (@TLOTL)

43. Rotting lead rate: The percentage of leads that go untouched by sales (no email, call or voicemail) before they start to “rot.” Keep in mind that the goal is not necessarily a 0% “rot-rate.” In some cases, it’s totally ok for sales to let leads “rot.” If sales has warmer leads to work, marketing can take back the leads that would otherwise rot and nurture them until they are ready. (@TLOTL)

44. Funnel jockey: The demand-generation expert in every successful marketing department who understands his or her funnel well enough to hard-wire the entire revenue manufacturing process, from marketing spend, to lead gen, to pipeline creation and booked revenue. This person is one of the Excel users in the marketing department who is most likely to have a working command of functions like VLOOKUP, GETPIVOTDATA, SUMPRODUCT, and RAND. (@TLOTL)

45. Campaign Sorcerer: Describes a marketer who can quickly articulate and illustrate campaign concepts with a unique and integrated skill set that includes design aesthetics, copywriting/storyboarding, program logistics, and schedule visualization. A Powerpoint/Keynote Magic User proficient in spell-casting with SnagIt and Photoshop. (@TLOTL)

46. Market whisperer: The agency-side marketer who can, in 30 minutes or less, figure out the essence of a client’s marketing and sales challenges, with minimal to no briefing from said client, consulting only Twitter, Google, WordPress and Michael Porter’s Five Forces model. This marketer is more likely than his or her peers to get away with wearing ironic tee shirts or quirky, comment-worthy eyewear/accessories. (@TLOTL)

47. Tweeps: Twitter + Peeps = Tweeps. (@TLOTL)

48. Product myopia: Outdated marketing thinking still practiced by many who engage with prospects and clients through the lens of their own solutions. (@cjablonski)

49. Trapping the chicken in the courtyard: A semi-obscure “Rocky II” reference/metaphor describing the relentless and often frustrating pursuit of repeatable marketing and sales success. “I feel like a Kentucky Fried idiot.” — Rocky Balboa (@TLOTL)

50. Buyer engagement: Your goal anytime a buyer comes into contact with you. To get their full attention and immerse them into a brand experience, make sure everything you do is valuable and differentiated. (@cjablonski)

Below are SiriusDecisions definitions I have included because they have done an amazing job of getting marketers to use their methodology and lingo. This is for the other marketers who aren’t Sirius trained and want to talk the talk (I chose the three most used terms)

51. MQL (Marketing qualified lead): Prospects defined by your marketing and sales organization as someone ready to pass to sales. They’re instrumental in calculating lead gen metrics, such as marketing qualified lead rate (# of MQLs/# of total marketing contacts).

52. SAL (Sales accepted lead): A lead that has met the basic tenets of qualification and that sales has agreed to engage. (@cjablonski)

53. SQL (Sales qualified lead): A prospect confirmed by sales as a true revenue opportunity and entered into the pipeline. (@cjablonski)

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Drumroll, please … Another ambitious post here: The Marketing Hipster Dictionary. When we started, I just wanted to create a post with some definitions of terms used in this blog and in the marketing space in general. Then we started having fun with some “originals.”

Before I go on, I must introduce my band. (Side note: I love when the lead singer introduces the band at concerts. I don’t know what it is — but I get excited.) On the guitar: Tom Scearce (@TLOTL). Tom is a brilliant marketer who understands marketing from brand to process. Follow him on Twitter. And on the electric keyboard: Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski). Chris can do anything. Period. And he does do everything, but he is not a dilettante. He does them all really well.

Ok, so here is the deal, my guitarist Tom wanted me to break this into a series. I prefer the big bang, so we compromised: The dictionary is broken into two: Today is the first 24. We will release the next 26 on Thursday. If you want to have fun and send in some, we may add it so send it over.

1. Marketing hipster or hipster marketing: The new bleeding-edge marketer. One of the first terms I’ve made up for this blog post but that I like a lot. If you’re doing some of the activities I’ve described below, you are a marketing hipster.

2. Lead qualification: People (with headsets), automation (CRM and marketing automation – yes, marketing automation) and process dedicated to contacting leads and qualifying them before passing them to sales. If you actually generate leads, you should do this. (See every other post on the Funnelholic.com). People can build this process for you like @bridgegroupinc or Stu Silverman (SalesRamp), or you can outsource qualification (numerous folks, I can’t even mention). Look, this is “old school” stuff, but it works. I sell leads, and what we’ve seen from our data is that companies with lead-qualification (and lead-nurturing) processes convert better than anyone else and, ultimately, buy more leads.

3. Conversion rate: The rate at which a prospect advances in your marketing process. I included this because everyone assumes conversion rate means landing page conversion. That is not true. Conversion rates happen across the life of a lead: Traffic to registration conversion, registration to lead conversion, lead to opportunity conversion, opportunity to sale conversion. Conversions happen all day in your process (I hope). Track them and watch them.

4. Lead scoring: Seriously, make it simple: the process of determining which leads are better than others. Don’t make it bigger than that. Use data you have now to start – this isn’t hard, then use marketing automation to implement, optimize and refine. Scoring seems so daunting, but it really isn’t when you finally tear down what it really is. The humans in your “conversion chain” score all the time in their head: They call certain leads more than others because they know they will convert.

5. Conversion chain: I just made that up in the previous definition, so I figured I would make a definition. The conversion chain is your series of conversion points you track from the top (e.g., Google, white paper syndication) to close. That’s a cool term. If it catches on, you heard it here first.

6. Metrics: Numbers generated via reporting that tell you something about your current processes. Yes, it can be called reporting or just “numbers,” but remember you want to be a b2b marketing hipster, so use the word: metrics. Here’s a tip: Choose three metrics to look at every day. Look at the rest once a week.

7. Pay-per-lead lead generation or performance-based lead generation: This is how marketers roll today. If you haven’t jumped on the PPL bandwagon, you should. You can get performance lead generation from media companies (such as the one I work at, Tippit) where you provide some sort of content such as a white paper in exchange for registration information. The media company will determine the number of leads they will deliver and a price. You can control your CPL metrics and organize around particular quantity numbers. This is good for marketers. You can also do this with appointment-setting vendors such as Green Leads, a firm led by one of the most active mavens on the market @damphoux.

8. Targeted email/email blast: Email is not for spam anymore. As marketers have gotten more sophisticated, they have gotten much better at outbound email. We have seen a big jump in email blasts to our database. You can blast to a third-party database (check out Marketfish for an amazing new targeted email application).

9. Trade show: Ah, the trade show. Let’s define a tradeshow as a broad industry event (e.g., Interop for IT), with a variety of different talk tracks, trade show booths, etc. Trade shows aren’t dying, they are just never going to be the same again. In ancient times, there were lots of tradeshows with lots of people and lots of vendors. Those days are gone. The trade shows that work are:

a. Raging parties: CES
b. Real education value: Sirius Decisions in marketing is a perfect example. They really focus on the content instead of pretending to help buyers, but peddling their own goods.

10. Live seminars: These can fall victim to the same symptoms as trade shows. The time commitment to travel ratio is minimized and the focus (not trying to be something for everyone) is compelling.

11. Lunch and learns: These are the same as live seminars but are shorter and with less content. Lunch and learns are small local, lunch events typically put on by vendors. They get 10 people, so the ROI is debatable.

12. Maven: Two years ago, I admit I had to look this one up. Here is the best technical definition: “A maven is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge.” A number of factors have made the role of the maven uber-critical in your life:

a. The role of third-party/thought leadership content in effective marketing practice. In other words, take a look around and you will find the best marketers incorporating the work of thought leaders and mavens instead of product sheets and data sheets.
b. Social media: the maven has gone from obscurity (only writing books and speaking at seminars) to global popularity with social media (Twitter in particular) and blogging. When I am doing research in my field, I go to my favorite mavens such as @ardath421 or @brianjcarroll in marketing (there are more obviously, but I need to restrain myself)

13. Maven marketing: I just made this phrase up too, and I’m hoping it sticks. Today’s marketer does two things with mavens:

a. Courts and/or works with mavens to create helpful buyer materials that don’t necessarily ever mention their product – that’s right. Mavens get more downloads than you and are TRUSTED. Today’s buyer trusts two people: their peers and their mavens. Those two groups far outweigh the vendor.
b. Creates mavens from their organization. Here’s one for all those people with social media budgets. Start by creating an internal maven. Here’s an example from the marketing industry: Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), VP at Hubspot, has 15,872 people who follow his every move on Twitter. They read him, respect him and re-Tweet him. That’s hipster marketing.

14. Marketing automation: This is an emerging software category offered by a plethora of vendors intended to consolidate, systematize and improve your marketing efforts. For some it’s nothing more than an email tool on steroids; for others, it’s delivering on the promise. Check out @cjablonski for more.

15. Content marketing: An Internet-spawned phenomenon embraced by B2B marketers. It has unleashed a torrent of information intended to build vendor thought leadership by way of educating the customer until sold on the brand. See @cjablonski.

16. Social media marketing: The marketing trend du jour with vendor outposts proliferating across social networking sites as they join communities and conversations in the effort to build awareness, drive sales and get people to talk about them. See @cjablonski.

17. Sales 2.0: I grabbed a technical definition from InsideCRM.com: “Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance.” What matters to you is that there are killer tools that make sales better. An example is Connect and Sell which is a new-age auto-dialer that guarantees sales connects. Why does that matter to a marketer?
a. It’s a great tool for your lead-qualification team.
b. The biggest lag on your conversion rates come from sales connecting with your leads. Offering them tools to be more effective is a win for you. Period.

18. Thought leadership: In a world full of information and “me-too” solutions, you need to differentiate and boost your signal-to-noise ratio through the delivery of expertise and original knowledge that your audience cares about. Tap your mavens for this. See @cjablonski.

19. White paper syndication: Your marketing assets reside on your Web site, but you can get a lot more mileage out of them if you make them available from relevant sites across the internet. Vendors like Tippit can get your content into the right hands to help spread your message and build the top of your funnel. See @cjablonski.

20. BANT (Budget Authority Need Timeframe): A qualification methodology, or information that must be gathered or agreed to before passing a lead to sales. BANT is an age-old tradition that is coming back in vogue (big-time). Note to self: BANT is not something you achieve in lead generation (don’t put timeframe on forms) but in lead qualification.

21. Personal branding: This concept is not new, and not unique to marketing. But every marketer needs to understand it and practice it. Interacting with the world through a well-defined “brand of you” gives you a unique perspective on how people engage those other brands that you are paid to promote. See @TLOTL.

22. Mass expertization: A rapidly growing population of people, typically with commercial or status-driven agendas, publishing original content drawn from their experience, for the consumption of peers and/or prospective business partners. See @TLOTL.

23. Webcast, Webinar or Web Seminar: A webcast is a presentation delivered over the Internet so that prospects can watch instead of read. Webcasts are typically an hour long and involve a PowerPoint presentation. Webcasts should not be confused with video. Yes, you can use video, but that is not your typical use-case for a webcast. Webcasts are great vehicles for education, lead nurturing, thought leadership and quantifiable lead generation.

24. Optimization: Overused marketer term but critical nonetheless. Every element of your demand-generation process has hidden pockets of opportunity to improve. Don’t think so? Hire a consultant or design thinker to review your content and your strategy and listen in disbelief. See @cjablonski.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Much of what you see below is attributed. Some, however, like the input from @scottalbro, were fed to me conversationally through stream of consciousness, so I didn’t attribute them. He is a great writer and would not be crazy about my translation.

So, without further ado, here they are. I hope you enjoy them.

Contribute to the conversation (@tlotl)

Create remarkable content (lots of it) (@tlotl)

Distribute remarkable content (@tlotl)

Evolve beyond managing CPL (@tlotl)

Bring data to Sales management (@tlotl)

Talk to in-market prospects (@tlotl)

Close the buyer loop (@tlotl)

Talk to people who have bought/customers (@tlotl)

Talk to people who chose a competitor (@tlotl)

Sit in on a sales call once a week

Sit in on a prospecting call

Create a lead scoring system

Implement a lead scoring system

BTW, if you are just starting on scoring, don’t get too extreme. Scoring means deciding which leads are better than others.

Don’t agree to restrictive BANT criteria without considering all the people you won’t have sales talk to (if you think about it, they probably do)

And if you are in a hyper-targeted market (e.g., are focused on managed service providers only), your unified lead definition should be only: the right person with interest. Anything more restrictive means one lead a month, and your organization in trouble

Meet with sales weekly/bi-weekly for anecdotal closed loop feedback

Make a decision based on metrics

Make lots of decisions based on metrics

Over-rule a metrics-driven decision with a decision made from the gut

Basically: Balance metrics with intuition

Oh, and track everything you can

Oh, and yes, the numbers will never be perfect, but they should be enough to help you make decisions

Follow the top marketing mavens on twitter

Read content from top marketing mavens on twitter

Ask a question you want answered on Focus.com (OK, you can ask it on LinkedIn, too)

Create a lead management plan that starts from the top (lead generation) to a passed lead (P.S., based on your unified lead definition)

Read your competitors marketing materials

Fill out a lead form on your competitors site and see how they qualify, convert and nurture you

Do a at least one webinar a month

Make the webinar focused on business pains and issues, NOT a demo for your product

Leverage experts and thought leaders in your industry to speak

P.S., have those same experts create white papers, blog posts, etc. for you

Think of webinars for ALL aspects: quantifiable lead generation, lead nurturing, education, thought leadership

Create a lead qualification organization (dedicated phone-based team focused on following up on leads)

Optimize your lead qualification organization

Read scripts, emails etc.

Send an email to your clients that doesn’t sell them anything but instead helps them do their job

Then send these helpful emails monthly

Then use the marketing automation system you bought to track efficiency

Don’t forget your current customers, or to put it another way, market and foster goodwill with your customers

Update your social media profiles for completeness and marketability even if you aren’t looking for a job (LinkedIn, Focus.com, Facebook)

Start a blog

Update your blog weekly minimum

Don’t write about yourself, your company, etc. on the blog, except once in awhile

Put marketing, lead generation blogs into your Google reader

Allot 22 minutes a day to reading industry-related content

Respect every single lead (@cjablonski)

“Systems design” your programs (@cjablonski)

Make calculated risks routinely (@cjablonski)

Delight the most loyal (@cjablonski)

Surprise your customers (@cjablonski)

Be your target audience (@cjablonski)

Rip and replace your strategies (@cjablonski)

Manage your brand symbols (@cjablonski)

Nurture as if you meant it (@cjablonski)

Cleanse your sales pipeline (@cjablonski)

Be authoritative

Track your metrics based on opportunities created and opportunities

Get everyone on CRM (seriously — Its 2010)

Get a sales 2.0 tool

Increasing connects increases conversion

Don’t complain about what sales is doing with your leads

Don’t complain about sales in general

Urgency. Just be urgent

Call your lead generation vendors and optimize the program with real data

Post your content on third-party Web sites to capture traffic not going to your Web site

Clearly define what your product is and the use case it solves for in buyer language on your Web site, in materials, etc. — how many Web sites do you go do and you can’t figure out what the f*** the vendor does?) (@mschmier)

Optimize your landing pages for conversion

Considering pulling fields OFF your landing pages to get more people to download

However, don’t think about immediate conversion, judge the show by important meetings had (could be with customers) and the “right” people. If you are looking at short-term conversion rates, you will cancel them all.

Test a new lead generation source whenever you can (or you’ll never know what works)

Not sure what to do about Facebook — if you can get business there, write me back for next year

Here are the reasons I’m keyed up about the Webcast — and you should be too:

1. It’s about lead nurturing, but better. Like you, when I see a link that says “lead nurturing,” I click on it. And I, like many of you, are often bummed about the content, which can be redundant, basic, conceptual and sometimes stupid. We strive to provide the opposite — content that is fresh and innovative and complete with concrete action items.

2. It captures the core of what we in sales and marketing really need to know. We are talking about nurturing’s three essential elements:

Content

The “human touch”

Marketing automation

3. We are presenting an all-star cast consisting of three of the biggest, smartest players in the business:

Brian Carroll (@brianjcarroll): The 800-pound gorilla in the demand-generation and lead-nurturing space, who is without a doubt the most famous blogger and speaker on those topics.

Scott Mersy (@smersy): A rising star. Pay attention, and see what we are noticing — more and more of Scott’s smart, insightful and helpful content on the Internet. As vice president of marketing and products at Genius.com, he’s an expert on what it takes to succeed at lead nurturing.

I am doing a great webinar with Tony Jaros from Sirius Decisions on Lead Nurturing. I just want to get a couple things straight about why I legitimately think you should come:

1. There is actionable advice — there is a lot of lead nurturing content on the Internet, none of them as good as this. Tony will give attendees a playbook so that they can go out and do something about this.

2. Lead nurturing is the most important thing you will do this year, and you have no idea how to get it done effectively. This is a repeat of #1, but it’s true. Lead nurturing is not just a buzzword, it’s mission-critical.

3. Tony Jaros is one of the smartest dudes in the business – folks, he is really good. And I have seen the deck. This will be really good stuff.

4. There will be zero selling, only educating – I like that myself. Now, I will sell myself and Tony of course, but that’s ego and not for commercial reasons.

I look forward to people coming to the webinar, and I hope for lively conversation. Please join us and please pass along word to your friends.

Click here to join The Definitive Lead Nurturing Playbook with Tony Jaros and The Funnelholic.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

I am speaking at a webinar on Thursday, November 13 at 4PM EST. The webinar centers on providing practical tips to help organizations actually use their CRM to do “marketing automation” and to do it quickly. As we enter into uncertain economic times, marketers need marketing automation more than ever. I hear the following all day: “I know we need marketing automation, I need to get on it.” TIME’S UP.

Hopefully, I can help marketers squeeze everything they can next year, even if they can’t get a off-the-shelf marketing automation system.

The year 2009 is going to be painful for a lot of businesses, but it should also be really interesting to see what marketing departments do to adjust. Next year will be the year you earn the big bucks.

Here are the givens:

Sales cycles will increase

Your buyers’ budgets will be cut drastically

A lot of your current contacts will be fired or will move

You won’t have the money you did this year to get what you want to get done

You want have the same amount of people you did this year in your organization either.

So what do you do? The flight to quality has begun and a couple “old school” marketing techniques may be finally put to rest in 2009. Here they are:

Direct mail: Admit it, do you really still do direct mail? The direct mail business is a relic of the past, and 2009 may be its end. My buddy does marketing for an online dating site and it works for him, but I can’t find any b2b buyers who can quantify or justify their direct mail spend. It’s finally time to make choices. That choice should be to move online.

Trade shows: Speaking of moving online, say good-bye to the trade show. People are not going to attend shows unless they are local. The cost of travel is unjustifiable when you can educate people online. Old-school trade shows at the Mandalay = dead. Online events such as virtual trade shows, webinars/webcasts, and moderator-led chat sessions will prevail. Come on, it makes sense. There’s little you can’t do on the Web. And that’s where your prospects are. Now I’ve stood by tradeshows over the past couple years because frankly they are great places to meet customers and partners, but not because they are quantifiable lead-generation vehicles. I’m sorry to lose the networking opportunity, but organizations will adjust with webconferencing and potentially telepresence. I just sat through a presentation at MarketingSherpa’s B-to-B Demand Generation Summit event and exhibitors are saying they are starting to see a 20 percent cancellation rate, up from single digits.

Print ad spends: Need I say more? The size of tech rags has gradually shrunk and nuclear ’09 may finish them off.

Radio and TV ads: Leave those to the B2C guys.

The theme is the same, I believe that we will see a move online. Yes, the online movement began years ago, but direct mail and trade shows refused to die. Now, thanks to today’s unique economic environment, say goodbye to your old friends as they enter the history books.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter